:func:`.attributes.flag_modified` where the change event would not be
propagated if the attribute had been reassigned to itself.
fixes #2997

against a non-selectable, such as a :func:`.literal_column`, and then
an attempt was made to use :meth:`.Query.join` such that the "left"
side would be determined as ``None`` and then fail.  This condition
is now detected explicitly.

flag for :func:`.event.listen` to work with mapper / instance events.

or :meth:`.MapperEvents.after_configured` events are applied to a
specific mapper or mapped class, as the events are only invoked
for the :class:`.Mapper` target at the general level.

is currently being supported in addition to nose, and will likely
be preferred to nose going forward.   The nose plugin system used
by SQLAlchemy has been split out so that it works under pytest as
well.  There are no plans to drop support for nose at the moment
and we hope that the test suite itself can continue to remain as
agnostic of testing platform as possible.  See the file
README.unittests.rst for updated information on running tests
with pytest.

The test plugin system has also been enhanced to support running
tests against mutiple database URLs at once, by specifying the ``--db``
and/or ``--dburi`` flags multiple times.  This does not run the entire test
suite for each database, but instead allows test cases that are specific
to certain backends make use of that backend as the test is run.
When using pytest as the test runner, the system will also run
specific test suites multiple times, once for each database, particularly
those tests within the "dialect suite".   The plan is that the enhanced
system will also be used by Alembic, and allow Alembic to run
migration operation tests against multiple backends in one run, including
third-party backends not included within Alembic itself.
Third party dialects and extensions are also encouraged to standardize
on SQLAlchemy's test suite as a basis; see the file README.dialects.rst
for background on building out from SQLAlchemy's test platform.

in particular the logic used to wrap "column default" callables
wouldn't work properly for Python built-ins.
fixes #2979

to specify the string ``"nested"``.  When set to ``"nested"`` as opposed
to ``True``, the "chaining" of joins will parenthesize the inner join on the
right side of an existing outer join, instead of chaining as a string
of outer joins.   This possibly should have been the default behavior
when 0.9 was released, as we introduced the feature of right-nested
joins in the ORM, however we are keeping it as a non-default for now
to avoid further surprises.
fixes #2976

:func:`.orm.lazyload` with the "wildcard" expression, e.g. ``"*"``,
would raise an assertion error in the case where the query didn't
contain any actual entities.  This assertion is meant for other cases
and was catching this one inadvertently.